Published May/June issue of ArtAsiaPacific. To read full article, visit the magazine's Digital Library. (Click on the image to scroll through pages.)
"During Young’s childhood, the port city was a bustling nexus of financial, cultural and industrial activity. Scrappy upstarts bloomed alongside international conglomerates. Some of the artist’s earliest memories were of the world of sound traveling to him through the spinning crackle of a record and a radio’s palm-sized speakers. Speaking from his industrial studio in Hong Kong, Young recalled that his mother worked at the technical appliances company General Electric. Once a year, she would bring home a cardboard box the size of a paperback book; within it would be the latest model of a portable radio set assembled in the factory where she was employed. Young infrequently saw his father, an entrepreneur who founded a travel agency, but he remembers his obsession with music, which manifested in towers of LaserDiscs and cutting-edge audio gadgets. This in turn fueled Young’s love of video games and media. “That was really an era of aspirations. Everyone aspired to a certain lifestyle, beautiful things,” he stated wistfully. “It was a special moment for Hong Kong. It was before Tiananmen Square happened. There was still some time left on the clock before the handover [of sovereignty to mainland China, in 1997]. The economy in the city really started to pick up in a big way.""